"Street grids are good" is one of the strongest ideas in City of Toronto urban design post-1997.
True.
With the Regent Park and Alex Park revitalizations in particular, the city has been very concerned about restoring street grids and giving every building a clear street address.
True.
The underlying assumption is that a "superblock" is necessarily bad because of its spatial qualities.
Lets define spacial qualities...... but sure I'll take the position that super blocks are inherently bad.
At Villiers, the response has been to create a grid, but one that includes oceans of open space, insufficient density to support much retail,
Not true. The facts are completely inconsistent with this statement.
and every opportunity to get in a car and leave.
Also not true. Aside from the fact there will be far less parking than households, so a number of households will be active transportation/public transport dependent, there is remarkably little car access in/out of Villiers and if everyone tried to use it as rush hour there would be endless gridlock.
I'd argue this will bring about some of the same spatial problems that Regent Park had: a lack of density and a lack of commercial activity. Car-free terrain is unsuccessful if it is vaguely defined, and there are few people, and there is no reason for outsiders to pass through. Grid urbanism also fails under the same conditions.
There will be no shortage of people based on existing proposals.
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There are flaws w/the Villiers plans, I agree some ROWs could be tightened and some street parking removed. I'd like shorter streetwalls in many locations as well.
The area is more car-centric as conceived than I would like, but that was the result of a choice not to serve it with higher-order transit (the LRT is not and will not be a subway substitute)
In order for the area to succeed commercially, it can't be isolated. For that to be true, the build-out of Queen's Quay East must occur before any development at Villiers, and Quayside and other proposals must arrive prior as well, animating Queen's Quay, and providing retail and other services.
Likewise, Cherry and Broadview and the key N-S connections, though the latter will be east of Villiers.
These need to be in place, with LRT and be at least partially, if not fully built out, before Villiers.
That means Villiers doesn't start residential build-out before the mid 2030s as things stand, and maybe later.
This is the problem of endless plans in lieu of substance, and people demanding every more re-writes of plans, rather than getting them right the first time, and beginning implementation.
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There is no real corollary here to the original Regent Park which was entirely low-income, rent-geared-to-income housing, with an entirely inward-facing design that naturally excluded outsiders.
Villiers, as currently conceived will not be that.
There is an allusion to be made to St. Jamestown, however. This area will be even more dense than St. Jamestown, which is a problem, it will be somewhat cut-off from the outside, as St.Jamestown was, particularly on an E-W basis, in the former's case. But also, St. Jamestown was built as mixed income, but not mixed tenure, and private landlords quickly allowed the community to be beset by neglect.
A mixed tenure model reduces, but does not eliminate said risk.
